This exchange got me thinking. Why indeed include the Steele dossier in the warrant application. Perhaps for more reason than to get the warrant, which is where most people take the reasoning. Maybe the rationale was to add heft to the dossier, or to link the warrant to the Trump campaign - a link that otherwise would not exist.
GOWDY: I would argue it's also somewhat unprecedented to rely on political opposition research to instruct and inform an application.And it's really bad precedent and unprecedented to not tell a court that a source has this level of bias. I mean, look at just the disclosure of who paid for it. They could have easily said it was the DNC and Hillary Clinton. That would have been really easy. I read the footnote.
I know exactly what the footnote says. It took longer to explain it the way they did than if they had just come right out and said Hillary Clinton for America and DNC paid for it. But they didn't do that.
BRENNAN: But short of that disclosure, you still would have believed this FISA surveillance warrant was justified? Your problem is in the disclosure within the application.
But the surveillance itself of this American Carter Page, who was named in your memo, who was at one point a Trump campaign associate, was that justified, that surveillance?
GOWDY: We will never know, because the application contained three parts. It contained -- it included the dossier. It included reference to a newspaper article which, by the way, no court in America considers a newspaper article to be evidence.
And it included other information they had on Carter Page. So, what I would say to the FBI and DOJ is, if you had enough on Carter Page with just him, why did you include something that "The National Enquirer" might not run, and why did you cite newspaper article, when there's no court in America that allows a newspaper article to be considered as evidence?
If you had enough without it, why did you use it? That would be my question to them.
We assume there is a denied warrant earlier, and further that the denied warrant was on Carter Page.
But maybe this is the first time the FBI sought a warrant on Page, and chose to investigate him not out of genuine concern he was an agent of a foreign power, but because he had some association with the Trump campaign. Look at the campaign, is there anybody there who touched Russia?
Sauce up the fictional dossier, include it in the application for warrant, and voila, the past warrantless surveillance of the Trump campaign has now been laundered by FISC.
A bit like laundering money, the FBI had to launder the evidence it had gathered without a warrant.
Maybe the dossier didn't add heft to the application, and McCabe's testimony that it was essential is misdirection.
Doesn't make much difference in the ultimate analysis - either way (dicy dossier essential to get the warrant; or dicey dossier not essential but validates surveillance of the Trump campaign) the FBI has used subterfuge to get a legal patina on spying on the Trump campaign